Archives For Internet Association

Last week, the Internet Association (“IA”) — a trade group representing some of America’s most dynamic and fastest growing tech companies, including the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and eBay — presented the incoming Trump Administration with a ten page policy paper entitled “Policy Roadmap for New Administration, Congress.”

The document’s content is not surprising, given its source: It is, in essence, a summary of the trade association’s members’ preferred policy positions, none of which is new or newly relevant. Which is fine, in principle; lobbying on behalf of members is what trade associations do — although we should be somewhat skeptical of a policy document that purports to represent the broader social welfare while it advocates for members’ preferred policies.

Indeed, despite being labeled a “roadmap,” the paper is backward-looking in certain key respects — a fact that leads to some strange syntax: “[the document is a] roadmap of key policy areas that have allowed the internet to grow, thrive, and ensure its continued success and ability to create jobs throughout our economy” (emphasis added). Since when is a “roadmap” needed to identify past policies? Indeed, as Bloomberg News reporter, Joshua Brustein, wrote:

The document released Monday is notable in that the same list of priorities could have been sent to a President-elect Hillary Clinton, or written two years ago.

As a wishlist of industry preferences, this would also be fine, in principle. But as an ostensibly forward-looking document, aimed at guiding policy transition, the IA paper is disappointingly un-self-aware. Rather than delineating an agenda aimed at improving policies to promote productivity, economic development and social cohesion throughout the economy, the document is overly focused on preserving certain regulations adopted at the dawn of the Internet age (when the internet was capitalized). Even more disappointing given the IA member companies’ central role in our contemporary lives, the document evinces no consideration of how Internet platforms themselves should strive to balance rights and responsibilities in new ways that promote meaningful internet freedom.

In short, the IA’s Roadmap constitutes a policy framework dutifully constructed to enable its members to maintain the status quo. While that might also serve to further some broader social aims, it’s difficult to see in the approach anything other than a defense of what got us here — not where we go from here.

To take one important example, the document reiterates the IA’s longstanding advocacy for the preservation of the online-intermediary safe harbors of the 20 year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) — which were adopted during the era of dial-up, and before any of the principal members of the Internet Association even existed. At the same time, however, it proposes to reform one piece of legislation — the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (“ECPA”) — precisely because, at 30 years old, it has long since become hopelessly out of date. But surely if outdatedness is a justification for asserting the inappropriateness of existing privacy/surveillance legislation — as seems proper, given the massive technological and social changes surrounding privacy — the same concern should apply to copyright legislation with equal force, given the arguably even-more-substantial upheavals in the economic and social role of creative content in society today.

Of course there “is more certainty in reselling the past, than inventing the future,” but a truly valuable roadmap for the future from some of the most powerful and visionary companies in America should begin to tackle some of the most complicated and nuanced questions facing our country. It would be nice to see a Roadmap premised upon a well-articulated theory of accountability across all of the Internet ecosystem in ways that protect property, integrity, choice and other essential aspects of modern civil society.

Each of IA’s companies was principally founded on a vision of improving some aspect of the human condition; in many respects they have succeeded. But as society changes, even past successes may later become inconsistent with evolving social mores and economic conditions, necessitating thoughtful introspection and, often, policy revision. The IA can do better than pick and choose from among existing policies based on unilateral advantage and a convenient repudiation of responsibility.

Thank you to @senorrinhatch for recognizing that "uncertain patent rights will lead to less innovation because drug companies will not spend the billions of dollars it typically costs to bring a new drug to market..." https://truthonthemarket.co